inFAMOUS Phantom
by Lost Dragon-Albarn
Summary: Being rewritten. While visiting his sister in Empire City, Danny, Sam, and Tucker just happen to be walking through the Historic District when a strange explosion kills thousands, nearly taking them out too, if not for Danny.DxS TrishxCole
1. Chapter 1

This story is brought to you courtesy of Emerald Wolf 915.

Emerald made a challenge that just looked golden to me and so I am takin' it up.

For a draft of what this challenge is, word for word, check out Emerald's page.

For now I'll simply state that I do not own Danny Phantom or inFamous.

-: Chapter One:-

A strange tingle went up Danny's spine as he walked with his girlfriend and best friend through the Historic district of Empire City. This tingle was followed by a visible pulse of blue that shorted out all of the electrical devices in the district, and possibly the city, and that was almost immediately followed by screams of pain and terror.

As they turned to look in the direction of the noise, Tucker and Sam moving to provide cover for Danny to transform into the hero/villain of Amity Park, the sky darkened. The light seemed to drain into one point near the tallest building in the city. This light, pulsating and growing very rapidly, set Danny on edge.

It was instinct alone that had him throwing his friends to the ground and throwing up the strongest Ecto-shield he could possibly manage. After four years straight of life and death battles, discovering his limits, overcoming them, and dealing with high school Danny's shield was a work of art. Vlad was incapable of penetrating it on his best day. He knew that through experience.

But this... pulse was something else. It certainly wasn't ectoplasmic in origin.

He watched, almost in slow motion due to the adrenaline flowing heavily through his veins as the pulsing sphere of energy grew ever closer, touching and vaporizing person after person. It was horrid.

A part of him in the back of his mind screamed out Jazz's name, remembering that she was supposed to be meeting them here not long after they arrived. But, as the pulse made contact with his shield and an electric shock began to wreak havoc on his body, changing it ever so slightly, he knew that if he let down that shield Sam and Tucker would die. He'd just have to pray that Jazz had been held up in her office.

The pulse reacted oddly with the ecto-shield, not that Danny could tell with his eyes closed in intense pain. The pure energy all around, at all sides of the shield, was... not weakening it, but rippling it. It was beginning to make it into a miniature pulse of it's own.

When the sphere of energy eventually reversed it's movement it did so with great effect. The shield imploded on the three friends, ectoplasm tinged with the overcharge of energy from the pulse splashing into his friend and girlfriend, sending them into convulsions of screaming pain.

It was over in the span of few seconds, from the EM pulse that cut off the technology to the point where Danny's shield imploded, but those short seconds would change their lives, and the world, forever.

Fighting off the pain and the fatigue, Danny moved to his friends. He saw that Sam had curled into a ball, the pain actually causing tears to form in the corner of her eyes. That was... well, impressive to say the least. There were very few things he'd known to make Sam cry. Pain had never been one of those things. Until then that is.

Tucker wasn't faring much better. He actually looked a little worse in fact. He was moaning loudly in pain and tears were already making trails down his face.

Luckily they were both conscious. He'd carry them if he had to, but, with the strain he could feel on his body already from just withstanding the blast, he really didn't want to have to.

"Sam," he said, his voice strained with the burning agony spreading through his limbs, "Tucker, we need to get up. We need to go find help." He first went to his girlfriend, pulling her up and to her feet. She was a little haggard and obviously feeling no better than Danny, but she was able to maintain her footing, if a bit slouched.

When Danny's hand made contact with her arm he was surprised by how warm she was. Compared to him, with his unnaturally low body temperature of seventy five point two degrees, she was always warm, but this was something else, she was burning up like she had a hell of a fever. If she wasn't standing there, taking deep breaths to steady herself, Danny would think she was almost to the point of cooking from the inside out.

"What happened?" she asked as Danny walked over to his black friend and began to lift him up as well.

"I'm not sure," Danny said. Tucker was actually a bit out of it. He was conscious, but didn't quite seem all there yet. Danny slung Tuck's arm mover his shoulder and continued speaking to Sam, "There was some kind of explosion, but it was... weird."

"Ghost weird?"

"No, it was something else," he began moving towards the Neon District. That was where Jazz's apartment was and, hoping against hope, maybe she was still there.

As they approached the Neon they came across the blast crater.

"Oh my god," Sam breathed out.

Tucker, who by this time was able to walk by himself, looked over it all, "What in the world happened?"

Danny walked up to the lip of the impact zone. He ducked back down immediately and turned to his two friends, motioning for them to get down. They ducked down and approached him.

"What's going on?"

"I'm not sure, but it doesn't look good," Danny turned around and looked over the edge of the crater, "There's some guy wearing some kind of weird tech standing over another guy in the middle of the crater. I dunno what he's doin', but he doesn't look like a paramedic to me." He turned back to the two of them, "You guys stay down I'm gonna go check this out." Reluctantly the other two agreed, if only for the fact that they knew Danny could take care of himself if the worst came to worst.

By the time Danny stood up though the guy in white was gone, leaving only the guy in yellow and black clothes, burns and scrapes all over his body laying there.

"He's gone," Danny told them, and thus the three of them made their way down to the fallen man.

"Is he..." Tucker pulled a thumb across his neck to avoid actually saying dead.

"No," the halfa leaned down and slapped the guy a couple times, "Hey, pal, wake up!"

The guy coughed a couple times and groaned before waking up. He opened his brown eyes and looked up into Danny's face, "What-"

"No time, something exploded. It's not safe here. Can you walk on your own?"

A cursory examination of himself, and the man nodded.

"I'm Danny, this is my girlfriend, Sam, and my best friend Tucker," He gestured to himself the single girl of the group and Tucker in turn as he helped the man to his feet.

"Cole, Cole McGrath."

"Let's save the pleasantries for some other time, for now let's just get the hell out of here," Sam said. Looking around it was easy to see that they couldn't get back out the way they came in.

At that point a helicopter came from over head, telling them to get to the bridge to Neon. It then turned to yell at a person lurking around in the parking garage right near by.

"Hey," Tucker pointed out, "We can get to the garage. That'll open up right onto the bridge."

They looked to each other, then nodded.

Danny led the way, Cole directly behind him, then Sam, followed by Tucker. They were careful to avoid the parts of the ground still glowing an angry red with heat that would undoubtedly sear the skin off their bones.

Just as they climbed up onto a bus that would serve as a ramp out of this crater Cole got a call.

"_Cole? You there? C'mon, man, pick up!_ " A slightly accented voice came over Cole's phone, just loud enough for all four to hear.

"Zeke? What's going on? I think there was an explosion..." as Cole spoke to his friend over the phone they kept moving, cars not destroyed by the original explosion were blowing up now due to the intense heat.

"_No shit, there was an explosion! TV says terrorists are blowin' shit up all over the place. You gotta to get to the Freemont bridge, I'll meet you there,_ " Zeke said to him over the phone.

"We'll see you there," Cole said back and the call was ended.

Just about then the four of them made it into the garage, Danny still in the lead. Cole had fallen behind. Then something odd happened.

Cole passed in front of the sparking electrical equipment, just like the other three, but unlike them the pure electricity jumped out of the sparing wires and began to drain into his body. The biggest surprise, other than the fact that this didn't immediately kill the heavily injured man was that it didn't even hurt him.

If Cole didn't know better he'd even say that he felt a little better for being shocked.

"You okay," Danny called over to him. He was wary about getting closer and getting zapped himself.

"Yeah," Cole said lowly, looking at his hands in disbelief, then repeated it louder, "Yeah."

They proceeded to make their way out of the garage more carefully, sometimes just barely managing to avoid minor explosions from the cars still in what was left of it.

After a short few minutes that seemed to take forever, the four of them made it down to street level.

Seeing the bridge so nearby lifted their spirits. They sprinted as fast as they could to what could be called their light of hope.

A few police cars were parked nearby, some people laying on the street injured, the cops obviously protecting them should the terrorists show back up and decide to take out the wounded for whatever reason they chose to.

A... thick man in gold sunglasses and with a hair style reminiscent of Elvis was waving energetically at Cole, yelling for him to make his way back across the bridge.

Suddenly bolts of lightning began to rain down from the sky. One took out one of the cop cars, killing the man standing next to it. Someone screamed that the terrorists were attacking again.

Cole took a step forward and got struck directly by a bolt. Unlike the surge in the garage, this one hurt like hell.

Danny grabbed the man by the arm after the bolt stopped, "Sam, Tuck, get across the bridge!" After shouting that order and seeing the two obey he slung McGrath over his shoulder in a fireman's carry and began to follow them at a good clip.

Lightning continued to rain down around them, burning holes in the bridge, blowing up cars, killing people. So far the three of them had been lucky not to be hit. Though it seemed the bolts were getting ever closer to striking Cole again.

Then something happened that nearly destroyed Danny's spirit.

Sam had stayed closer to him, worried almost to the point of stupidity for her overly heroic boyfriend, and was caught in the fiery blast of a car exploding beneath a bolt of electricity.

"SAM!" Danny screamed. He knew there was no way his girl could survi-

As quickly as the fire appeared it began to disappear. It was odd because it was flowing downwards. A split second later would reveal a scene Danny would never forget.

Sam, cringing away from the source of the explosion, _absorbed_ the flames and heat into her pale skin, giving her a kind of heavily tanned look.

Unfortunately, with all the chaos still going on around them, they didn't have time to rejoice. Danny shifted his hold on Cole and shouted, "MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!" And began to sprint ever harder for the other side of the bridge.

They made it across only a few seconds later, and the exact moment Danny lay his foot down on the street of the Neon, another bolt, bigger and more powerful than all the others, struck Cole and then him, causing the two guys to scream in pain.

Cole took the brunt of the hit, but Danny got his own share of the Electric charge. The two of them fell over, no longer in the world of the conscious, the very last thing Danny saw was the fat man lifting up Sam, who had finally collapsed not long after he and Cole did, before moving towards the two of them, Tucker already over one shoulder.

-: Flare Pistol :-

Over the next two days Danny drifted in and out of consciousness, seeing the world for brief moments before being knocked back out by the overwhelming pain. The first glimpse he had saw a the fat man, Zeke he assumed, sitting next to another bed reading a magazine and Same sitting at the end of his bed. Her hair had been let down out of it's normal style and cut short, giving her a tomboyish look.

The next glimpse showed Zeke still there, but at the foot of the other bed was a pretty nurse with short brown hair who looked to be in emotional turmoil as she looked at partially burnt photo while whispering to the person in the other bed.

Most of the times he woke up was at night when there was nothing but a dark room and the steady beep of two EKG machines monitoring his heart beat and the other person's. He guessed it was Cole. Zeke had no other reason that he could think of to come to this room so often.

When Danny finally woke up for good the room was full.

Tucker and Sam were at the foot of his bed with a face that relieved him to see almost as much as Sam's.

"Jazz," Danny breathed out, "You're okay?"

The flame haired woman nodded, and she wiped tears of relief away from her eyes as she and his two friends swarmed him in a group hug. He tenderly moved his arms, that still ached a little from the incident just a couple days ago, and wrapped them around the three of them.

Sam proceeded to whisper into his ear, the warm breath from her words tickling him slightly, "Soon as we get back to Jazz's we've got something to show you," Tucker nodded at this. Then, whispering even lower so only Danny could hear, "When it's just the two of us..." Danny blushed at her promise.

Their group hug was interrupted by the pretty nurse from one of the black haired young man';s lucid periods.

"Danny was it?"

Tucker, Jazz, and Sam pulled up and off of him to give him a clear view of the woman.

"Yeah?"

"Thank you," she said with sincerity, "Thank you for bringing Cole back to me."

Danny nodded to her. He wanted to say something to her, but he didn't know of anything that would get the message across without sounding cheap.

Having said her piece she walked back over to McGrath's bed, sat down in a foldable chair, and took his hand into her own.

Danny watched all this and felt a little depressed. Just how many people had he failed to bring back to someone?

A sharp pinch on one cheek brought a yelp of pain from him. He turned a glare on his attacker and found Sam giving him a defiant look.

"Don't even start getting all emo on me, Fenton! You were damn lucky to survive that thing at all, let alone getting us out alive too!" Danny's eyes lost the intense glare, but the turmoil of what he felt was fail was still burning him from the inside.

Sam's own look softened, and she gently lay a hand along his cheek. Four years of playing the hero, and this the first time anyone had actually died on his watch, let alone the thousands that had been killed by that electric pulse.

Tucker decided that they needed to get out of the hospital and find something to lighten the mood, so said, "Let's get you discharged, buddy. We'll catch you up on recent events once we're out of here."

-: Gale Slash :-

A few hours later found the two Fentons, Sam, and tucker sitting in the living room of Jazz's apartment. They explained to him about the quarantine on the city that had been erected not even a few hours after the initial blast. That already the city was going to hell, gangs were taking over, each district had sealed itself off from the other. The government said that they were doing all they could to get them help, but so far nothing was happening.

"So what was it you guys wanted to show me?" Danny asked nervously after all the bad things that had been revealed.

Sam looked over at Tucker. He shrugged and made a gesture for her to take the floor. She nodded then.

"You may want to stay sitting for this," Sam herself stood and took on a look of concentration. After a couple seconds of this a orange ring of fire appeared around her center that split into two, one traveling up, the other down.

As the rings moved Sam seemed to become a photo negative of herself. Her baggy black jeans became a silvery white, her purple tank top became an apple green, her hair turned into shifting reds, yellows, and oranges, giving it the appearance of flame licking at the air. Her purple eyes became a reflective silver, her sclera turning black.

Danny's jaw was practically on the floor.

"How...?"

"Wait, you haven't seen everything yet," Jazz said.

Tucker stood up now and took on a similar look of concentration that Sam had and, in a swirl of teal colored wind he became a photo negative of himself as well. He's army green pants became violet, his yellow shirt turned royal blue, and his beret became a teal color that matched his eyes in human form. His eyes had turned green like Danny's own. His hair turned from it's naturally very dark brown to slate grey.

"As you can see," Sam began, "We're part ghost now too, but we also seem to have a small amount of control over wind and fire, respectively." Tucker nodded as he reverted back to his human form. Sam followed suit.

"It must have happened when the shield collapsed," Danny said. He looked to be about ready to start blaming himself for making his friends into something half dead, when Sam pinched his cheek again.

"I told you already, Fenton, I will not have you going all emo on me!" She stood back up straight and crossed her arms under her breasts and said, "I'll have you know that Tuck and I think this pretty damn cool, right Tuck?"

"Hells to the yeah! I know we never mentioned it much, but it was hell watchin you fight all those baddies and knowing there wasn't anything we could do to help."

"But you guys-"

"Yeah, without us you'd be full dead more than once, but now we can do more than chase you and whatever ghost around on scooters and carry extra thermoses for you. Now we can help, Danny, really help," Sam sat down beside him and wrapped him in a hug.

Danny returned the hug, feeling that, unlike him, Sam was a bit warmer than the average human.

After sitting there in silence for a little while and enjoying the warmth of his now half ghost girlfriend he pulled away.

"I'm gonna train you two. There's no way I'm letting you two flounder around like I did when I first became a halfa," he said with a finality that they wouldn't have argued with if they thought it was a bad idea.

-: Hail Grenade :-

Day fourteen after the quarantine was raised all around empire. Danny, Sam, and Tucker were on the roof of his sister's apartment building, practicing their particular elemental control. In the twelve days since he woke up he'd been training them almost exclusively. First he'd taught them how to shoot ecto beams. It was one of his most useful abilities. Sam's were violet in color, Tuck's being yellow. They lacked the raw power that Danny's did, but that was to be expected. He'd spent the last four years fighting ghosts and learning everything Vlad knew at a rate far faster rate than the crazed up fruitloop could match.

The next thing he taught them was the ecto-shield. It was also one of his more useful abilities. After that it was his cloning technique. He taught them everything he could. By the time it came for them to focus on their elemental control they were far more ready to face the ghostly enemies lurking in the world than he was at the start of that whole mess.

Speaking of their elemental control, that was something that, after a few visits from Cole, they began to show openly.

It appeared that surviving the blast had somehow given Cole power over electricity. He used it to his advantage openly, much to the other's surprise, and he wasn't shunned for it. At first people though it was weird, but soon got over it. In light of this the three of them thought it just might be okay to display their own elemental control, if not the entirety of their ghost powers.

Danny's ice powers had changed too. They were easier to access, easier to control. He'd even made a couple of new attacks. And it was great just being able to hold a drink in hand to keep it cold enough to drink.

That was one thing that Sam couldn't indulge in anymore. She couldn't drink most liquids, it was almost like poison. Water especially. It was almost like her body, being aligned with fire, completely resisted water. It even started to hurt her if she stayed under the shower too long.

The upside was that she didn't actually need moisture to live anymore.

Tucker's own power over wind didn't have a downside that was quite as visible as Sam's. He just became really claustrophobic when he couldn't feel the movement of the air over his skin. He had to have a fan on him at all times when he was inside or he went into panic attacks.

But conversely when he was outside he was more at peace than it seemed he'd ever been throughout his life. He could also fly, publicly, using his control over wind to lift him into the air.

He offered to do the same for Sam and Danny, but one instance where the two of them found them in the air without the control they had gotten used to in their ghost form they found it far too unnerving.

Currently the three of them were training in their elements, as mentioned earlier, just trying to pass the time till the sun was higher in the sky. It was a bad idea to go out into the streets early in the morning or after the sun set. It was dangerous enough during the day, but at night the Reapers, one of the top three gangs in the city, were far less forgiving than during day. Yeah, the three of them had powers, but being bullet proof wasn't in their repertoire of abilities. Better safe than dead.

"Okay, Sam try to copy this move with your fire," Danny held his hands in front of him, his fingers slightly curled and palms facing each other. He then began to force highly condensed cold air to swirl between the two hands, building up it's power till it glowed light blue and hummed with energy.

Then Danny shoved both his hands forward, targeting a can among twenty that they had set up for target practice exercises. The glowing sphere turned into a beam that hit that specific can, froze it, and then spread outwards from the impact zone to freeze two cans to each side of it. Ice spread outward visibly till all five cans were encased in two foot thick crystaline ice.

Tucker whistled, impressed, "Dude."

Sam looked at that and took the challenge with a smirk, "Too easy, loverboy."

Sam repeated Danny's pose, gather more and more heat and fire between her palms. There were of course some difference's between her sphere and her boyfriends. For one her was yellow at it's center, where his had been white, orange on the outer ring, where his had been a very light blue. Perhaps the most impressive difference was the sound.

Danny's Ice Bolt had hummed.

Sam's Flare Pistol _roared._

She let it go at the same can Danny had fired at. Like Danny's Ice Bolt her attack hit the center can, melting and evaporating the ice almost immediately, then spread outwards, taking setting two can's on either side, and the stand they were sitting on, on fire. In the course of a few seconds the tin cans were reduced to nothing but molten metal.

To prevent the fire from spreading, Danny hit the remains of her attack with a generic cryo blast.

Tucker gave another whistle, then smirked and took a step forward.

"Peh, you guys haven't seen anything yet," He held his left hand out and to the side, then slashed it horizontally through the air, not even pausing to gather energy like Sam and Danny did. A visible ripple in the air spead towards the cans at about half the speed of Sam and Danny's attacks, but it was wider than theirs.

The ripple hit the remaining fifteen cans and the top half of them all came off at the same time.

"I call it the Gale Slash. Cool, huh?"

It was about then that a plane could be seen flying low over the city, dropping food in each of the three districts. They saw that the container for the Neon landed in the park. They gave each other a look, then nodded.

"Let's go."

-: End Chapter One :-

AN: As you can see, this will mostly follow Danny, Sam, and Tucker. Cole will be a major part of the group in chapter two and onwards, but I wanted to set up these three before anything else.

And yes, The challenge did say that Tucker should have fire, and Same wind, but I think Sam has more fire in her spirit than Tucker, while the techy was a bit more wistful during the Danny Phantom series than the other two.

And yes, the line breaks are giving you the titles of their special moves. I thought it would be cool.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter two is brought to you by the awesomeness that is both Danny Phantom and inFAMOUS.

I see that I have slightly misjudged the market for this kind of fanfiction seeing as only a few people have even looked at it, but I shall remain persistent. I want to see this fiction from now to the end.

To ghostATR: Damn straight I am anxious over iF 2. inFAMOUS was the very first game I got for my PS3. Other games have come and gone, but inFAMOUS has outlived them all!

The only games I have kept longer than inFAMOUS are my favorites of the Final Fantasy series, which most certainly excludes twelve and thirteen, Kingdom Hearts, and Jak and Daxter.

And that's only because those games have been out longer.

Now:

-: Chapter Two:-

Danny, Sam and Tucker got to the seen just in time to see Cole zap the piss out of one of the Reapers. They heard someone call out that it was safe and people swarmed to the food boxes.

Danny's eyes narrowed on McGrath when he saw electricity flowing over his right hand. He approached the man who, though not a friend, was at least a close acquaintance. When they had Elemental training, he would occasionally join them. That was where he learned the Thunder Drop.

Even so, Danny wouldn't let Cole stop other people from eating, no matter what the reason was.

He placed a hand on McGrath's shoulder and said, with a sureness in his voice that let the older man know he was serious about it, "Don't... I'll put you down." He emphasized this by making his hand chilly, though not enough to make ice, but enough for Cole to feel the freezing touch through his clothing.

Cole looked at Danny, who was watching his girlfriend give some candy to a few kids that had gathered, smiling as they celebrated the meager treat. He estimated if he'd be able to take the kid out.

Before he could really contemplate it, Trish came up to him, a smile on her face.

"Cole, thanks for getting rid of the Reapers. These people might not have survived much longer without some fresh food."

Cole was silent for a moment before shrugging off Danny's hand and saying, "Just doing what's right."

He had no idea he was about to be screwed over by a douche on a big screen.

The static flickering indicative of the TV Hacker was heard and on the big viewing screen, extremely visible from the park, the guy stood there, "Yo, check this, people. We've been looking for the asshole that started this mess since day one, and we found him!" A video of Cole walkin' down the street showed up on the big screen, blurry but recognizeable, "This guy's Cole McGrath. He's the punk that blew up the Historic and he's the reason everything went to hell around here! If you see him, run. He's dangerous like you wouldn't believe. Voice of Survival, out."

Danny had stepped away from Cole when the man started talking to Trish. He had assumed that with the man's girlfriend there, there would be no more trouble.

But after that announcement from the TV Hacker things took a turn for the worst. Trish seemed to take the news the hardest. She simply held a picture of her dead sister, killed in the explosion in the Historic, and looked at Cole with a kind of contempt...

Danny frowned and looked away from the scene. That was his worst nightmare. Not with Sam. He knew that Sam, Tucker, and himself would be together till the end of time, if it came to it, but his parents...

Everything about his parents involvement with ghosts pointed to the conclusion that they would either hate him or want him dead. He wasn't sure he could bare the weight of the look Trish was giving Cole from his own parents.

Looking around them, everyone was beginning to crowd around, mumbling things to each other with glares directed at Cole. Some of them began to pick up stones and anything they could use as weapons.

This lit a figurative fire in Danny's eyes. He looked to Tucker and Sam, getting subtle nods.

"Cole, get out of here, we'll cover you."

McGrath sat there for a few moments and gave him a look mixed with gratitude and anger, though not really directed at Danny. He nodded and took off, using parkour and his new found powers to flee before the crowd could get too riled up.

Danny looked to Zeke who looked, for once, like he was thinking heavily. He shook it off and looked in the direction Cole had run, deciding to follow his friend.

"Hey!" Danny shouted at all of the people, momentarily gaining their attention, "What the hell do you think you're doing!"

Some of the people looked confused, while others began to say that they were chasing the terrorist, but Danny interrupted them.

"No! You're picking a scapegoat out of a crowd of thousands! So what if the TV Jacker says he did it! How do _you_ know that it's him! Did you witness him set the bomb off!"

Sam and Tucker were standing at his side now, glaring at the parks occupants.

"Yeah," Sam spoke up, "Did you _not_ just see him get the food for everyone? _Protect _the food for everyone?"

"...But... But he has those freaky powers!" A chorus of 'Yeah's followed after this.

Danny didn't bother to respond to that. He just glared darkly at the man that said it then turned and stalked off, his form stiff with the rage induced by the comment of that ignorant man. It was an unwanted reminder of his everlasting outlaw status in his hometown. Worse, what he'd always feared his parents would say about him.

Sam, however had something to say, "You know what you sound like?" she asked the crowd, a growl in her voice, "You sound like the KKK." That brought gasps and vehement denials. She raised her voice to be heard over the louder speakers, "You PERSECUTE anyone not like you, anyone different."

She then followed the path of her boyfriend, Tucker following after her, deciding he had nothing to add to what was already said.

-: Cryo Spear:-

Meanwhile, outside of the quarantine, Vlad Masters was finding himself to be more and more annoyed as time went by.

He was the richest man on this side of the state, he had more contacts than most people had books, both ghostly and human, and, adding in his ghost powers, he was not a man with whom to fuck.

And yet, his every entrance into Empire city was blocked, either by the regular military, or the Guys in White, or, strangely enough, the FBI. The last time he tried to bribe his way into the city he found himself face to face with three FBI spooks, all equipped with ecto-disruptive pistols. They assured that they knew exactly what he was and exactly what their guns would do to him. They told him how, up to that point, they had left him alone because he wasn't really hurting anyone.

Ruining other businesses was of no concern to them. Interfering in government matters... He'd find himself full ghost very quickly.

He'd had no choice but to back off. For a little while.

To be sure, he would find a loophole, a gap in their defenses, a weakness for him to exploit. Then, once he had Danny, he would show them the error of messing with him. They'd rue the day they denied him _anything_.

"It's always such a bother," a voice startled him out of his irritated musing, "when the government gets involved."

Vlad whirled around, a frown on his face already becoming fierce. What he saw was an old man in white clothing, wearing some kind of weird device on his right that had glowing blue lenses.

"Who are you? What are you doing in my room?" Vlad demanded.

"Is that anyway to talk to an ally," the man paused and grinned at Vlad with a malicious split of his aged face, "Plasmius?"

-: Rapid Fire:-

After taking a few minutes to cool off the three halfa's tried to trace where they thought Cole would go.

It was about twenty minutes before he found them, walking along with Zeke back to the big man's place.

The moment he saw them, Cole waved them over, a serious look on his face.

Once they were on his little rooftop sanctuary he began explaining what happened after they covered his escape.

"... It was some kind of device that drains all the the electricity out of every living thing in range and then pushes it all into the holder of the sphere."

"Damn man!" Zeke exclaimed, "That thing dishes out superpowers! We gotta get it back," he didn't need to say, 'So I can use it.'

"Yeah," Cole said with a roll of his eyes, "I could use a side kick." He ignored Zeke's comments about Zeke Jedediah Dunbar being no man's side kick.

"But you three are the anomolies. How you survived the blast, how you got the powers. Moya said there was something fishy about it."

Before Danny could founder about with an excuse Sam stepped up to the plate. She'd apparently thought a lot about what exactly to say if the questions ever came up. Good thing too. Danny was gonna say something about being the lucky three in ten thousand and hoped it floated.

"I dunno for sure," she started, "But I think it has to do with what we did at the time. Danny, especially. See, we were a long ways away from where you were, Cole. Just about at the edge of the island. When the sphere went off the three of us were only caught in it partially, Danny more so than Tucker and I cause he tried to push us into safety.

"Maybe, by then, the sphere wasn't able to kill us."

Zeke and Cole looked at each other and shrugged. Sounded good to them.

"And your powers? How'd ya get those?" Zeke pressed now, wanting to know how to do it himself.

Tucker's turn, "Dude, the human brain, in all but a few cases, is only about ten percent active through out a person's life. I'm betting what we can do," he lifted himself off the ground with a bit of wind manipulation, "is something to do with the other ninety percent. The- Ray Sphere?- Ray Sphere, didn't kill us, but what if it changed us, up here," he tapped his head.

"_Sounds good to me,_" the voice of a woman suddenly piped up from Cole's shoulder. His phone was apparently on.

That brought frowns from everyone.

"What the hell-" Cole began but was interrupted by Moya.

"_You're my only agent on the inside, Cole. I'm monitoring _all_ of your conversations._"

"Oh, that's great. Don't remember that in the fine print," he snarked.

"_The Fine Print__, Cole, is that somewhere in that city is a weapon. A weapon capable of such destruction that I wouldn't even want to imagine what would happen if the First Sons finally get it working again. If you think there's any rules, regulations, or code of conduct for this scenario then you need to wake up!_"

"Yeah, whatever. Anything else you want?"

"_Yes, actually, several things. First,_" She went on to explain some things that needed done around the city. Some kind of weird interference from a nearby roof top, one of her agents gone missing, and a medic in need of help.

"I can take care of the interference," Tuck said, "just need to find the source, then I can hack it, maybe even figure out who's doing it and why."

"Sam and I can handle helping out the medic," Danny piped up, "That should really help out the people here if we can get a working clinic up and running."

"Guess I'm going after the agent then," Cole nodded to the other three.

"_Great, get going._" Moya got in the final word then clicked the phone off. Of course, if what she said about monitoring his conversations was true, she was still listening.

"Okay," Sam ventured, "So, we all meet up back hear after it's all said and done?"

A round of nods.

-: Typhoon Bullet:-

Sam and Danny arrived in the alley and saw the medic there, pacing back and forth nervously, waiting for help. Moya had contacted him, briefly, not that he knew her name, and told him that people were coming to help.

"Hey," Danny greeted quietly, "You called for help?"

The guy snapped his head in their direction and after a few seconds inspection, a frown alighted his face.

"What? You're it! You're just a couple kids!" he exclaimed, gesticulating wildly.

Sam just grinned and conjured a fireball that she proceeded to throw from hand to hand like a baseball, "Believe me, we can handle it."

-: Hail Grenade:-

Tucker found the source of the interference pretty easy. It was a satellite dish, a small one, and it had a memory card on it. Shrugging, Fole pulled the memory card and set it into his PDA. A few seconds of tapping at the hand held device yielded unsatisfactory results.

"Aw, man," Tucker groaned, "The encryption is in parts. I gotta get at least two more of these things before I can get anything solid out of this." He ignored the fact that he was talking to himself.

"Let's see, the other dishes should have the same kind of interference signal emitting from them so I just need to..." his voice lowered to the point of inaudability as he continued to mess with his PDA, hacking the signal he'd found earlier and setting his hand held to make a kind of sonar for other satellite dishes.

Almost immediately, he got seven in range hits.

"Whoa, this looked like it's gonna be something big," he lifted himself into the air and began to soar to the next closest dish.

And found himself almost shot in the head by some Reapers lurking on the roof tops.

"Hey!" he shouted down at the red clothed men, "Watch where your aiming those things, damn it!"

The reapers looked at each other for a moment before aiming their weapons and sending a rail of deadly gunfire at the gale-mancer.

An indignant squawk of fear had followed Tucker as he dropped about twenty feet straight down to avoid their fire before he bum rushed them and unleashed a huge gust of wind right into their guts at point blank. The powerful gusts sent the two Reapers flying to collide with a wall and water tower respectively, thankfully neither one falling off the roof.

Sure, they had tried to kill him, and had killed countless others, but Tucker wasn't sure if he wanted to, or would ever want to, take a life.

"Hey," he said as he got a better look around the roof, "There's the dish." Just about then the lights for the entire district went out.

-: Inferno Blast:-

Sam and Danny could be found in their shared bedroom back at Jazz's apartment. Sam was holding on to Danny for dear life. Danny was practically catatonic, staring down at his hand with almost imperceptible horror.

Sam was trying to reassure the young man that he did the right thing, that he was _not_ evil, that she knew he wouldn't do that again if he could help it, but nothing was getting through.

Danny just continued to sit there, shutting out the world as he stared at his hands. His blood stained hands.

-: Flashback:-

Things were going well.

The Reapers may have had guns, but that was all they had. Their coordination sucked, they couldn't shoot that well, and the only form of teamwork they employed was in not trying to shoot each other, which they weren't too good at.

Even with the half dozen or so of them that there were, it was almost too easy for Sam and Danny to take them out.

Then it happened.

Sam was focused on one of the Reapers before her, being careful not to use her powers- it would be all too easy to kill one of these idiots with the heat she could produce- when another one snuck up behind her.

Sam didn't even know he was there and Danny, who just noticed the thug as he raised his shotgun to the Goth's head, was too far away to tackle the guy or deflect the gun away from his girlfriend's head.

"SAM!" Danny yelled in a mix of fear and anxiety as he tried to run to save her despite knowing the distance would be impossible to cross in time, even if he were in his phantom form.

Hearing her boyfriend shout her name, Sam turned around and found her self face to barrel with a sawed off shotgun about to plan a full shot right into her head. She screwed her eyes shut, praying to whatever deity that may be listening to at least make sure Danny would be okay without her, when...

Nothing happened. No bang, no pain, no... anything really.

Well, that's not completely true.

There was a sound, a fleshy thunking sound.

Opening her eyes to see happened, Sam was surprised to find the Reaper standing there, convulsing, a spike of ice through his heart from his back.

-: End Flashback:-

First, Danny had checked to make sure that Sam was okay, then he realized exactly what he'd done. He realized that he killed a man. He realized that he _wanted_ to kill that man. Perhaps worst of all, to him at least, he felt joy at seeing that man dead.

Morbidly, he wondered whether or not that was how his future self felt every time he ended a life. If it started out small like this, just protecting himself, then escalated, like some kind of drug. He wondered if this was the first step to becoming a mass murdering evil bastard. He wondered-

Bam!

Danny cried out in pain and his hand flew to his left cheek.

Standing over him was his sister, staring down at him with a half lidded gaze that made her appear unimpressed with his exclamation.

"What the hell, Jazz!"

"That's enough, Danny," his older sister said to him, crossing her arms again.

"Enough what?" He was still trying to rub the pain out of his cheek. That wasn't a slap just to get his attention, it was like the ultimate judo slap of pain. He must have done something to really piss Jazz off.

"Enough moping, Danny. You were in the right."

"In the right? IN THE RIGHT! I KILLED a man!"

"TO SAVE SAM!" Jazz roared louder than he had, "If you hadn't done anything that girl right there," she pointed to Sam, who looked devastated herself after the whole ordeal, "would be DEAD!"

"But I could have done something else! I didn't have to kill him! Bad guys kill, Vlad kills! I'm not a bad guy!"

"Fine, tell me how else you could have stopped him, tell me what nonlethal maneuver could have stopped him from killing Sam."

Danny glared at her and opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. His first thought was to just freeze the guy. But that would have killed him too.

Next was to hit the weapon out of his hands. But he didn't have the right angle for that.

He could have fired the spike at the guys arm, but that could cause him to squeeze the trigger in pain, then there was no sure way to make it that the guy didn't bleed to death while the hospitals were closed.

Danny went on and on, thinking up other things that he could have done to stop the guy, but nothing worked that didn't have a chance of killing the man that tried to kill Sam.

"I... I... I don't know," He was pulled into a hug by his sister, soon joined by his girlfriend, as he finally came to terms with what had happened.

He _had_ killed a man, but there were some extenuating circumstance. Murder was still bad, and he would still try to figure out ways to end everything without killing anyone, but he was on the path to accepting that _death_ was a part of _life_.

-: End chapter:-

A/N: sorry this is so late, but I'm easily distracted. You'll have to thank EmeraldWolf for this chapter too. I don't think that without him I'd have gotten to this as soon as I did.

Also, sorry that this is kind of short, but I wanted to address the necessity of death in certain situations and Danny's coming to terms with it. It is kind of pivotal to this story that certain people die, and if Danny is stuck being a self righteous cuss, refusing to kill anyone no matter what, then more people would suffer than if that person had died.

Next chapter will be a bit of a skip to later. Not gonna tell ya how far, but not too far I assure ya.


End file.
